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Special Technology Access ResourceSTAR Center |
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Tom's Story |
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| The problem is that I can't summarize my interest in the STAR of Seattle computer lab in just a few words. | |
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My involvement in the lab begins way before lab itself existed, and started in discussions with Carolyn Carlson from the city of Seattle department of neighborhoods. At that point in time I was thinking about moving out of Center Park to a location in West Seattle and I was describing to her the psychological nature Center Park and the people in it. ( About how many people around here were just up on their floors staring at the walls.) |
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| Several months later, she called me in order to do some consulting for a community center done on Rainier which had a computer center in it, and said that they wanted to make their computer center more accessible to people with disabilities. Unfortunately, they wanted to do it all in one or two stations, which doesn't usually work because of technical compatibility problems,-but the situation kept computers and Center Park on Carolyn Carlson's mind. | |
A while later, when the Seattle housing authority originally offered Center Park some of its old equipment, things sort of fell into place when the city of Seattle got involved again, with her neighborhood technology grant programs. |
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| During college, I had been lab assistant at Seattle University, helping to teach people BASIC and Fortran programming skills, so I was already familiar with tutoring individuals on computer related topics. I also have a degree in clinical biology and had spent several years after graduating working in hospitals on rehabilitation units with patients who had suffered strokes, closed head injuries and spinal cord injuries etc. some of which involved orienting patients with activities that could be performed using a computer. | |
| Later, I worked with Dr. Marvin broke who was then the head of rehabilitation services at Harborview medical Center. He was, among other things, developing computer-related models for testing visual perceptual capabilities of persons who had sustained closed head injuries as a result of trauma. | |
| In my own life, I had been looking for a way to write faster, because my cerebral palsy affected my manual dexterity in such a way as to slow things down in that respect. In school, I always done rather well except when it came to writing papers, because my dexterity always slowed me down. I would do great on the tests and then get an incomplete out of the course until the papers were done. I also used tape recorders and personnel to get note taking accomplished, but that only worked for some situations. | |
| When IBM's Display writer came out, (in about 1980,) I knew that computers were headed in that direction. (The Display writer was IBM's attempt at making the first dedicated word processor, which was the predecessor to today's PCs.) I was a college student in really couldn't afford the Display writer, but I kept my eye on the technology hoping that someday, things would advance to the extent that it would make speech recognition possible. | |
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By the time the STAR center of Seattle had his first training for Certified Lab Monitors in September 1999, speech recognition technology, (in the form of Dragon Naturally Speaking software, was well on its way.) I had already been involved in several of the planning stages for the STAR of Seattle, but when, during the training of certified lab volunteers I heard about Dragon Naturally Speaking I was hooked for good! |
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Additionally I was also being trained alongside people who were retired physical and occupational therapists, which made me feel right at home given my educational background and also gave me the feeling that the STAR center might have a chance at being more "professional," then some of the projects that I had seen at Center Park in the past. |
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So as you can see there was quite a confluence of different factors which led me to volunteer at the STAR center of Seattle. Because of my college experience with helping people with programming issues at Seattle University, I already knew that I could help tutor people here. Because of my experience with clinical biology and rehabilitation services, I knew that I could help assess the relationship between the technology and their medical -disability issues. Because of my own interest in writing faster, I developed an insatiable interest in speech recognition technology. |
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Contact Information:Jacque Cook STAR of Seattle Executive Director Telephone 206-325-4284 Postal address 2121 26th Ave. S. If you need directions to the STAR Center click here. Electronic mail General Information: starofseattle@cablespeed.com
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